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Friday, June 2, 2017

"Listening to Sweet Transvestite"
24 x 48"
Acrylic with gold leaf

I did this larger than life sized painting a few years ago for a Halloween art show at a local gallery. The theme of the show was the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I had very little time to complete a piece so I worked in acrylic which I knew would be quick. I very rarely work in acrylic or oil unless I am doing a demo while teaching a class, so this is something really unusual for me. This painting eventually lead to me doing my series of music inspired pastels. I wrote about this in a past blog on April 21, 2016.

I pulled it out of storage the other day, dusted it off and took another look at it. I wanted to enter an acrylic painting into an upcoming show at the Charles Taylor Art Center since I will be teaching oil and acrylics there this summer. This painting came to mind and I thought perhaps I could give it a bit of a touch up and try my luck. It is a bit controversial for this part of highly conservative Virginia, so I would be surprised if it got in.

I decided to tie it in with my current series, and show a figure being immersed in pattern, as if they are surrounded by music. First I went back into the figure and tightened up a few messy spots.Once I was satisfied with my improvements I added gold leaf. The original painting was intended to be highly textured, so I glued crinkled tissue paper to the canvas and painted over it. I gilded the tops of the crinkles and added pattern that wrapped around the figure.

The canvas is 2 inches thick, so I wrapped the image around the edges. Where you see the lettering cropped off, it actually is continued on the sides of the piece.

This subject, the rights of transgender people and cross dressers, is actually something that I feel very strongly about. The model for this painting is a family member who is cross dresser. He was actually just dressed in jeans, with no make up for our impromptu photo shoot. I had great fun dressing him up in my painting.

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Listen to the song that inspired me here at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHEuwGSxUs0

The inspiration

My big brother Jeff died last summer. He had a fast moving cancer and we were all in incredible shock to loose him. He loved music and devoted much of his life to performance as many of my siblings have done. At the church service my former brother in law who is an amazing organist, was asked to perform for the funeral. Bob has played for all of our family's weddings and funerals, and I love to listen to him. I used to perform with he and my sister Shelly at various churches in my youth so I was still somewhat familiar with traditional organ music. Shelly wanted Bob to play this piece by Charles-Marie Widor because it was Jeff's favorite organ piece. The song was actually written for the Catholic church and is still being played today at weddings and Christmas services at the Vatican itself. It is a song of great celebration and happiness. It didn't seem entirely appropriate for a funeral unless you knew Jeff and his love for secular music. Bob didn't play it that day, but I decided to come home and listen to it closely with my headphones after the services. I hoped that it might ease my grief a bit.

When I heard this song again after so many years, I was immediately transformed to a blissful place by Widor's heavenly tribute to his church. I saw angels, gilded arches. and an overwhelming sense of joy. I don't go to church anymore but I decided to draw it. How could I not?

As my mind wandered during the drawing process as it tends to do, I got to pondering if non- Christian folks would have similar visions while hearing this very famous song. I decided that every person would feel moved by it regardless of their religion or lack there of. I think that the many atheists in my life would feel joy. My pagan children would feel the light of their own gods. My Buddhist little brother would be mesmorized. My gay, lesbian and transvestite friends, who are so often loathed and abandoned by most churches, would hopefully feel love and light. We would all be humbled, as Jeff was, by this masterpiece. Click this link to hear a recording of the master performing it himself shortly before his death. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqeMJ-UbiZA

This piece gave me an opportunity to express my strong belief that one does not have to be Christian to go to heaven or to have a good moral foundation. For this reason I included symbols of other religions including other things that people may worship that are not necessarily religious. I am sure that my belief in the freedom of worship will upset some folks who believe that their religion and moral code is the only true life, but I hope that they at least listen to the song as they study my piece and understand where I am coming from.

The Technique

That being said, I wanted to include a few progress shots. I have always been a close follower of the work of Cuong Nguyen. https://www.icuong.com/. Instead of using the traditional method of doing a monochromatic under painting using grey or brown tones his pastel under painting is a vibrant green! It is not a new idea however I have never seen it done in pastel before. Once the value and temperature is established then he glazes over the green with red and orange tones to get a very realistic and translucent flesh tone. I bought a few of his e-books through his web site above and gave it a shot here for the first time. The traditional proces is best described below."Verdaccio is an underpainting technique - and specific paint color - which originates from the Italian fresco painters of the early Renaissance. Created traditionally from a mixture of Mars Black and Yellow Ochre pigments, Verdaccio was used to establish tonal values in fresco painting quickly, creating a soft greenish-gray for the shadows of flesh tones. Architectural details in frescoes were often left in the pure Verdaccio coloring, hence we are able to still see evidence of it today in works such as Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes." https://feltmagnet.com/painting/what-is-verdaccio-and-how-to-use-it-in-your-paintingsOk, below are my works in progress shots. I got so into the work by the end that I totally forgot include the shots of the final stages, sorry.

Add warm greens over the highlights and cool greens or grays in the shadows. Leaving the background for later.

Adding some red and gold tones over the green.

A rough application for the back ground. Once I had all of the details in the background I used Liquitex gold metallic acrylic paint for the gilding. See my blog from a few weeks ago to learn more about the gilding.

Monday, May 22, 2017

OK, I am really going to try this time. I am going to write in my blog at least once a week. Blogging for me is more like keeping an art diary that I share with the world, and so it includes an occasional cuss word and a large amount of bad jokes and satire. That's your disclaimer, that's all you get.

If I don't have a new piece available to show, or a failed piece available to post for that matter, I will share websites of some of the artists who I stalk, I mean who I follow. I try to devote at least a bit of time daily studying and stealing ideas. (Read the book "Steal like an Artist" by Austin Kleon) Many of my biggest inspirations have been realists who are long dead and who's paintings are now worth millions. However, I have a long list of still living artists who have taught me simply by posting their works on line or by winning a spot in the Pastel Journal. I have an excel sheet called "Artists to Stalk", and when I get a chance I pick an artist from my list and study their work. I add to this list constantly. Don't worry, I don't actually like... you know, show up at their house with binoculars and follow them around town while they shop, as if they are the Beatles and I am some pimply faced teenager hiding my camera. I just study their work and read their Facebook entries and blogs while allowing their energy to inspire me.

It seems only fitting that I should start with the artist who has encouraged and influenced me the most over the years. She got her start by stalking me! Rita Kirkman and I met while we were both in our late teens in 1986. We drew portraits from life at Cedar Point. I was Rita's teacher, and I was amazed how quickly she learned, and I never forgot her ability to literally stalk me while we were at work. (She might have even had a pair of binoculars and a camera in her back pocket!) If she didn't have a client, she was leaning over my shoulders watching my every move as I drew from life. In fact, the year before she applied at the park she had her portrait done and took it home and copied it over and over again. This is a practice that I still use today when teaching new students. We sketched an average of 100 faces or more on a Saturday and worked 6 days a week, sketching from life for 8 - 10 hours a day. I welcomed her attention most of the time, and we became great friends. After work we would wash off the pastel and go out dancing with our fellow artists. Prince and huge hair were pretty popular that year.

Here is a photo Rita took of me while she was "stalking" me at work.

A few years later Rita was assigned as my assistant manager when I was moved down to Virginia to manage the portrait and caricature operation at Busch Gardens. This is around the time when she started entering her work into small local shows. After a few years she moved on to manage her own park in Texas, and soon after became very serious about her fine art career. I on the other hand made the mistake of devoting every inch of energy that I had to drawing quick sketches for the next several decades, as you may have read in previous blogs. Once in a while I might do a painting or drawing for pleasure, then stuff it in a portfolio.

Rita and I recovering after a night out with our fellow artists in the mid 1990s,

Rita came for a visit a few years ago. She asked to see my "studio" Since I didn't have one she asked to see my art, but I really didn't have any that I was willing to show anyone, however she wouldn't let it drop. So, with great reluctance and the courage found in a glass of wine I took her into the garage. I just started pulling out dusty canvases that I hid behind the furnace and a few bulging portfolios so that she could go through them. I figured she would say, "Oh, that's nice" then go back in the living room for another glass. I was not so fortunate. Man oh man she gave me hell for hiding my work. After that she helped me get my feet wet and gave me countless tips about working in the art world. It was also her idea for me to start entering into competitions on line. I blame it all on her. Thank you Rita!

Rita Kirkman "Big Mama"36 x35"Pastel

Rita Kirkman "Elfling"8 x 6"Pastel

Rita now is big time. Her works are constantly published internationally and she sells successfully at shows and exhibits. She shares her knowledge freely with the world through her blogging, Youtube video tutorials and workshops. We still keep in touch and stalk each other every opportunity we get.

Please add her to your own list of artist's to stalk!
https://ritakirkman.com/
http://ritakirkman.blogspot.com/

Sunday, May 21, 2017

I have been playing around with various types of reflective gilded effects on my drawing for about a year now. The first time I saw a painting with added gilding was a painting by Klimt. About a year ago I saw several very large paintings by Kahinde Wiley that had gold leaf added. I doubt that I am the first to attempt it over a dry medium, but I wanted to give it a shot.

It turned out that this was easier said than done. First I tried the traditional method of using adhesive then rubbing the gold leaf into it. (Mona Lisa brand of gold leaf) Of course, as expected the adhesive did not stick to the dust of the pastel. I tried using rubbing alcohol over the areas that I wanted to glue, letting it dry then adding the adhesive followed with rubbing on the gold leaf, but that was nothing short of a disaster. Then I tried cutting out the gold leave with scissors and using a clear glue. Nope, the gold leaf crumples up into a little ball once it is removed from the backing no matter how careful I was.

So, the next step was to try liquid gilding. It actually has little specks of gold in it. (Martha Stewart Liquid gilding) It is very bright and sort of orangy looking. After I applied it to the pastel the edges of the paint sort of oozed into the dust. Plus, I knew that if I did not varnish the liquid gold that it would eventually tarnish. Perhaps I could add the varnish with a fine brush later, but I was not convinced that it was going to be archival since it was not water based.

Then, one day as I was teaching one of my beginning painting workshops and I had the students add gold acrylic paint to sparkle up a simple canvas. hmmmmm

I had put this drawing of Bandon into my marinating pile. (I let it sit out of site for a while then pull it back out instead of throwing directly into the trash. Sometimes I can save it, sometimes not.) I poured a small amount of the gold liquitex paint and thinned it out just a tad with water. If it was too thick it just sort of rolled over the dust of the pastel. I used a small but stiff liner to apply it to the pastel. I mostly used small dots and a few thin lines since I did not want this to turn into a mixed media project. I had to rinse my brush often since the pastel stuck to the brush and created this sort of toothpastey like result with my paint, but I kept my patience and plodded on.

The end result was very pleasing. I also know that since it is just acrylic, which is basically plastic, it would last as long as the drawing itself with out causing any damage to my work. I am glad that I did not throw this little drawing of my handsome son in law into the trash. All he needed was a little bling.

My inspiration for this piece is a well known movement by Beethoven called Moonlight Sonata. You can listen to it here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT7_IZPHHb0. I wanted to convey the somber yet soft melody with the use of blue tones in both the flat background and the figure's face. Although Moths are nocturnal, they are drawn to the light. It seemed appropriate to draw him surrounded by moths and staring off to the side as if he is contemplating his life. The background itself reminded me of an old wall paper with a simple floral pattern on it. I drew the background with a vertical texture, hoping to add a feeling of rain, or perhaps the shafts of moonlight. The gold added a warm spark that changes as you walk around it when the gold catches the light.

I played this on the piano obsessively as a kid. It is one of the few things that I can still play, but I no longer have it memorized. When I hear it I remember how it used to play it as if I was very sad.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Here is a little article that I wrote for the Mid Atlantic Pastel Society's Newsletter. I know that I have not blogged in a while. Sorry! I have had many amazing and positive things happen in the last year. I do also use my facebook account as a blog, so if you want daily entries just go to https://www.facebook.com/EmFlowers and friend request me.

An Inspiration for Making “A”rt With Pastels

I have been asked by MAPS to explain why I love
working with pastel and what inspires me as an artist, but these are not one
sentence answers. I am not sure what motivates most artists, but what has
motivated me for most of my adult life after art school was simply drawing my
booty off to support myself. I was a portrait machine. I made most of my income
as a street artist, drawing 5 minute profiles in pastel, which explains my
comfort with the medium. I averaged 100
or more faces on a good day when I was younger. I also worked from photos drawing
pets that I thought would please my clients. Regardless of my degree and
earlier ambitions this was all that I did. I only worked for extrinsic rewards.

I didn’t draw often outside of work primarily because
many of my 1980s art professors were highly convincing that the only art worthy
of hanging in public was non-objective work. I liked realism. I was harshly ridiculed
for wanting to draw like a realist in school by both professors and fellow
students. It was so humiliating. Realism was dead they explained. As a result of
these experiences I hid all of my future studio work in bulging portfolios tucked
away in the back of the garage. I know that sounds horrible but before you go
and judge me let me explain a few things first. You need to bear with me for a few more
paragraphs before you can understand why I am now motivated much differently.

First let me answer the easier question about
why I love pastel. I adore the feel of the dust on my fingers and the way that
the medium moves over the tooth of the paper. It never “dries” so you can come
back to it any time you want. I also
think that working with pure pigment without the hassle of a brush getting in
the way is great fun. A judge told me once that
another good motivation to focus on pastel is that there are not nearly as many
pastel artists showing in art festivals as there are artists working in oil,
acrylic or watercolor. That was good to know. Even if my work was lousy I had a
better chance of getting into shows someday. Cool!

My artistic motivation is a much more
complicated issue. A few years ago I
started searching for some sort of inspiration to create work that had some
deeper meaning for me other than just a making a copy of a person’s face. I was nearing 50 and had never entered a
single competition or did one fine art fair. I began spending hours reading and
studying other artists in between my craft classes that I was teaching at that
time. I drew every day. I even sent up prayers asking for signs to aim me
in the right direction but all I could do is draw what I thought people wanted
to buy since that is all that I had ever done. I was just a robot, or at least that’s how I felt.
I was very confused and had hit rock bottom art-esteem.

One day as I was crying into my coffee over my
frustration I remembered that when I was a kid I used put on headphones and doodle
to music to ease my teen anxieties. I came from a musical family and studied
classical music as a kid, so music always whisked me away to a better place. When I combined music with drawing it was
almost magical. I didn’t care about the end product back then, I just needed to
stay calm and it worked. I would fill
pages with swirls, squiggles and patterns wrapped around cartoonish looking
faces and floating eyeballs. (Today they call this “Zentangle”, which I find
highly amusing.) I think I forgot about
this experience over the years, but it suddenly came back to me. So, desperate
for any form of relief from my mid-life anxieties, I put on headphones and just
let it go. The experience was highly meditative. I had absolutely no ambition
to please anyone. It felt so good. My technical muscles were still flexing out
of habit, but the music took over and I just drew how the music made me
feel. It was not a portrait of my kid,
but more of an auto-biography. It was better than meditation and far cheaper
than a shrink. Heck, it was even better than alcohol!

I created many drawings after that based on
music, choosing of course the medium that I was most familiar with, which is
pastel. Perhaps a better description
would be that the drawings chose me and began to flow and ooze out of my head. Eventually
I became more concerned with research, pre-drawings and all that boring but necessary
stuff that realists are required to do, but the most important change was that
I stopped trying so hard to please the world. For the first time as an adult I was drawing
for myself and only for myself. I didn’t
really care how anything turned out because I was not working for clients. My pastel work became an auto- biography of my
own grief and about how music calms me. I
entered in competitions and shows to keep me on my toes, but I never expected
to actually win anything. Oddly enough
galleries and judges started to notice me. I am still astonished when I get an
award.

I soon realized that by combining tight photo
realism with pattern brings the viewer into a deeper state of consciousness,
just as listening to music brings me into a deeper meditative state. The pattern
that twists about the figure represents the music. If folks don’t get it, eh,
oh well.

My advice to other artists and my students, (I
teach fine art now instead of crafting), is to just stop caring what the world
thinks and draw what you love and work however you want. If you are required to
make art for your living as I still am, set some studio time aside for
yourself. Use the materials that make you happy and start having fun with what
you are creating instead of thinking about the extrinsic rewards. Your work
will glow with your own spiritual energy if you work for intrinsic reasons.
That is the truest motivation of all.

P.S. After writing this I was about to send it
off for the newsletter when I received notification that I have been
juried into the very prestigious International Guild of Realism. Ha!
Take that art school professors!

Thursday, May 19, 2016

One of the very first tunes I was able to plunk out on our family piano was of course Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It was originally a French tune that other composers adapted to their own variations. The most famous adaptation was of course by Mozart. The Lyrics were later added in 1806 by English sisters, Ann and Jane Taylor.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Please understand that in my opinion there is NOTHING wrong with being a commission based pet portrait artist. However after 30 years of drawing what people told me to draw I felt like I was restless to expand, as I have explained in earlier blog posts. For the past few years I had been searching for some sort of inspiration to create a series that had some deeper meaning for me, but I kept coming up with blanks. I spent hours reading and studying other artists. I drew every day. I even sent up prayers asking for signs to aim me in the right direction.

Last season I filled my show tent with well rendered drawings of animals that I thought people might want to buy. It was hard work and I took it very seriously. There was no time for mistakes, I had to make money as an artist. Don't get me wrong, I love the process of drawing, and often go into a meditative state when I do so, but I never forgot that I had to please the art world gatekeepers.

Last fall my friend Larry Vanover became the curator of a new gallery, The West Mercury Center for the Arts. He thought it would be fun to have a themed show for Halloween. Everything in the show had to be about the movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or had to be scary. I almost didn't do it. I had a long list of clients waiting for their pet portraits for Christmas and I didn't have time to paint for fun. Larry however was so encouraging that I gave in and took a few days off from my portrait orders. I decided that I didn't care how it turned out, I was just going to have a good time and if he didn't hang it, that was OK with me. I needed a break anyhow.

In order to prepare I watched the movie and did some doodling, but nothing was coming up. I was actually quite familiar with the musical and saw it many times in the theater. It reminded me of my more rebellious days in art school, and the music always brought me joy. My future son in law walked in the room as I was researching and we got to talking about his practice of cross dressing and now much he loved the movie. I grabbed my camera and did a short photo shoot in the living room with him. He was just wearing his usual garb of jeans and no makeup, nothing fancy, but wow was he photogenic!

I put my head phones on with the sound track playing, and grabbed my acrylics with a glass of wine. I shut my brain off and my hand just took over and danced with the music. Listening to the music and shutting off my inner voice actually changed the way I painted! It was more like doodling. I seemed to be able to reach a deeper state of meditation with the proper music. (Listen to "Sweet Transvestite")

Much to my surprise Larry hung it at the show, and we had a blast at the opening where Brandon was dressed as a classy, beautiful and very tall woman. Larry dressed as Dr. Frank N, Furter. I dressed as a color wheel. Larry and a few other artists at the reception told me that they thought I might be onto something.
They asked where I got the idea and I told them that I just listened to the musical while I painted and it sort of popped out.

At the opening of "High Heels and Horror" art show at the West Mercury Center of the Arts in Hampton Virginia. From left to right, My daughter's fiance Brandon, Me, and Larry on the right.

I sort of forgot about the idea of painting while meditating to music as I was completing my long list of pet portrait commissions for the holidays. Unfortunately, soon after the holidays tragedy struck my family and my career was temporarily forgotten. I was so angry at the world, I didn't care about pleasing clients, I just needed to get out of my own head for a while. As a kid I always turned to either visual art or music to ease anxiety, so I grabbed a really odd photo of one of my kids, put on headphones and lost myself in drawing. For the first time in many years, perhaps since before art school, I just painted for fun. I stopped taking it all so seriously and just let it flow. The technical aspects of drawing have been so ingrained into my brain from so many years of pleasing the world that I didn't even really need to think about what I was doing. It was the deepest I had ever gotten into the automatic art that I researched last winter and blogged about in January. (See my blog about Surrealism.) This therapy felt so good that I did another one of my daughter, then another one and then yet another. I didn't care how they looked to others. I doubt that they will win any awards or sell, but I don't care. It feels right and I am healing.

My grief is continuing, but I feel a little better each day, although I have some very bad days yet. I think that God and the universe answered my prayers in a round about way. It seems that I just needed to get mad enough at the world to paint for myself. I needed to connect the dots between music therapy and art therapy.

So far I have completed 7 music related pastels since February. I will try to get around to blogging more of the series that I am calling "Listening". They will debut live this weekend at my first fine art show of the year, Art on the Square in Williamsburg, VA on Sunday April 24. The gatekeepers of the local art world may love them or hate them, I don't know. All I know is that it finally feels right.

About Me

I thought it would be fun to write a blog about my artistic path. I hope you enjoy keeping up with my progress. You can e-mail me at Emilychristoff@aol.com. You can check out more work at www.EmilyChristoff.com. I have work for sale and for auction at DailyPaintworks.com at http://www.dailypaintworks.com/artists/emily-christoff-flowers-5058/artwork.